50 Days without a Smartphone

So. What's it like?

I’ve been smartphone free for 50 days.¹ In my actual life, lots of folks come up to me and say, “Well?!” with an almost wild curiosity. “What’s it like?!”

I get it. What’s it like? is the question I was crazy enough to try to answer for myself. In fact, it was not having an answer to this specific question that nagged at me every day for years. It’s the reason I decided, instead of drastically limiting my smartphone use, to ditch it completely. I don’t think smartphones are evil. It’s just, if there was a different way to live—one that was actually possible in my hyper-connected, highly populated life—I wanted to know that.

It’s the poet² in me. I don’t like assuming that the template I’ve been given for my life is the only template available. I wonder, since I’m just doing what everyone else is doing, what do I not know about what life can be?

In other words, What’s it like?

This is the one. It’s a lot less shiny in person.

The experience has been surprisingly difficult to sum up in a short answer, so here’s the long one.

If you give up your smartphone…

You will spend a lot of time in silence.

Silence while you dry your hair, silence while you cook dinner, silence while you work, silence while you drive. Eventually, desperate for sound, you will become reacquainted with FM radio in your car, re-memorizing (against your will) the words to such melodic masterpieces as Katy Perry’s “Firework” and Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats.”³ From the backseat, your kids will ask, annoyed, why you skip between songs so much, and you will realize they are completely unfamiliar with the concept of station/channel surfing.

Your social circle will slowly, slowly contract.

When half your group texts don’t come through, when you can’t read screenshots or view photos, when you choose from only a handful of emojis and type words at the rate of one per minute, when you don’t have contacts in your phone so don’t know who the dozens of “happy birthday” messages are from and don’t respond… when all of this happens week after week, people will eventually give up. Most won’t send the memes or random observations, and some will stop texting altogether. Only the patient ones will check in, mercifully willing to ask only “yes or no” questions. You will be weirdly okay with this. The friends will be there when you are connected again… or they won’t.

You will remember what it feels like to do one thing at a time.

Because you don’t get emails on your phone, you will, for hours-long stretches, forget email exists. When you do check email (mostly for work), it will be because you sat down, opened your laptop, and mentally entered email mode. When you do take photos, it will be because you retrieved your big, heavy camera and entered photography mode. When you pull out your fat spiral planner, it will be to plan things. When you cook, you’ll just cook. When you walk, you’ll just walk. When you watch tv, you’ll just watch tv.

Fourth of July, captured by The Big Camera.

You will remember how to say “I can’t.”

Because customer service requires a photo of the damage before you return something, and you can’t send it. Because the furniture company requires you to schedule delivery via a link you can’t click on. All those things you thought you absolutely couldn’t get around? You’ll get around them. After you say “I can’t” for a while, people will stop demanding things from you. Your kids will stop asking you to Google pictures of an Axolotl, to play Taylor Swift songs, to immediately replace the eaten granola bars. The not-being-able-to will become just as normal as the constant being-able-to, and people will forget to care.

You will get lost.

The outdated GPS built into your car will wildly miscalculate arrival times, remain ignorant of the recent highway re-routing that took place in your city, and direct you to a post office that doesn’t exist. If you are 30 minutes late because of this GPS, you will not be able to Google the phone number of the tennis camp where your kids wait, rackets in hand. You will just be late. You will be embarrassed, and you will apologize, and the world will not end. And this constant reminder of the-world-not-ending when you say “I can’t” will shock you day after day and, somehow, it will comfort you. Your mistakes will begin to feel inevitable, no longer impossible and humiliating.

You will not know so many things.

When you sit down with your laptop, you will have a clear sense of what you must do, and none of it will involve reading your way down the rabbit holes of current events. When you meet up with friends, you will know nothing of Supreme Court shenanigans, imploded submersibles, or the Turkish president’s reversal on Sweden’s NATO membership. You will surprise yourself by not feeling even a tiny bit embarrassed. (See above: “I can’t.”) When you run, you will not know how far or how fast. You will just run until you want to stop. The pressure to know will lift. It will.

You will be constantly inconvenienced and slowed down.

You will be forced to reset every password that’s stored in your iPhone. You will make multiple trips to the UPS store instead of one because you forgot to write out the address of your destination and can’t look it up in line. When you try to find an important voicemail, you will need to listen to (literally) 32 messages to get to the one at the end, pressing “7 to delete” and “9 to save” every last one before you can hear the one you need. Even when you check the time on your phone, it will take minutes to update. You will get very accustomed to waiting. You will sometimes be highly annoyed, especially at the beginning, but you will learn to factor inconvenience into your day, and it will stop bothering you so much.

You will adapt.

Instead of texting your husband a Chipotle order for six kids, you will write it on a piece of paper and send a (very) grainy photo to your husband’s phone. Instead of texting your sister the groceries you’ll take on vacation, you’ll spread them out on the floor and snap another pixelated photo. Instead of texting your book club, you’ll email them. Once, on a long solitary drive, you’ll download an entire audiobook, prop your laptop open in the passenger seat of your car, and pray you don’t have to slam on the brakes. But also, the feeling of boredom will diminish faster than you expect, until you almost forget that you used to fill every minute with some task or sound or image. And: Other people will adapt to you. They will, in the most glorious possible way, lower their expectations of you.

You will enjoy the physical presence of other people.

In your memory, you will hold on to all the things you would normally tell and ask your friends via text. Without constant digital contact, you will want to see people in-person. And when friends come over for your birthday or you meet a couple for dinner, you will experience a richness of conversation that has come from saving and savoring. You will have remembered the things that mattered and forgotten the ones that didn’t. It will feel the same to them but different to you.

You will become astonishingly uninterested in both your flip phone and the iPhone in your office drawer.

The flip phone might as well be a brick for all its usefulness, so you will carry it only to call or be called by your family. Sometimes you will forget it at home, or you will not charge it for 3 days straight. The iPhone will also seem like a brick, the world’s heaviest brick, one that you are not sure you ever want to pick up again, much less heave around everywhere you go. When you make it 25 days and then 50 days, you think you will begin counting down until you get your phone back. But you won’t count down because you won’t care, you won’t even know if you want it back, and this will feel impossible but true.

Every technology you took for granted will seem like the marvel it actually is.

Distanced from the apps and the videos-about-everything and the curated music piped straight into your air pods, those things will begin to feel again like luxuries rather than necessities. Some things, you will not miss even a little bit (social media). Other things you will stop hating (voicemails). You know that, if you use your smartphone again, it will feel just like it did circa 2010, when everything was new and the capabilities of that thing in your pocket! blew your mind.

You will get your time back.

When you want to do something “purposeless,” like help your twins construct elaborate zip lines for their LEGO people across the kitchen, you will not feel that subtle mental nag of the “Other Thing” or “Million Other Things” you could be doing. Because you will know that, since your phone reported more than 3 hours a day of screen time, you have 3 hours back that you can spend however you please. So: You will read 2 or 3 books a week. You will start running again. You will take actual breaks from work to sit outside or stare at a wall, time that would’ve sunk into social media or reading the news before, time that now feels luxurious and free.

That’s it. That’s what it’s like.

If forced to give a short answer to “What’s it like?”, my answer is something along the lines of “Not really a big deal?”

Of every outcome I expected, “not a big deal” wasn’t one.

Disconnecting has, in a million small ways, changed everything about my life. And, at the same time, it has changed nothing.

I’ve had more bad things happen to me (and, let’s be clear, because of me) in the last two months than in the two years before that. But not one of those bad things was related to the smartphone. Life just keeps happening. Terrible things and wonderful things keep happening.⁴ Now, I can know with certainty the glowing smartphone in my pocket or the useless flip phone I forgot at home doesn’t change any of that.

I can know for sure that the smartphone—for all its convenience and satisfaction and intrigue—wasn’t making my “deep-down life” any better. With or without it, I am still me, impatient and sensitive and kind and selfish.

Because I know this, not having the phone feels like that: not really a big deal.

I am perfectly content without it. Happy. As those bad things have happened, I have had more of the joy, slowness, and calm to process them well. A couple of those bad things put me in a dark place. Before, I think I would have distracted myself (and been, against my will, distracted). I would have hummed along, low-key sad, probably for months, without taking the time to face anything.⁵ I have this feeling now of “clearing the decks,” both emotionally and with regard to email, texts, and communication in general. I have this feeling of being caught up, even though I’m less caught up than I’ve ever been in my whole adult life.

Because when you don’t see or hear the emails coming through, it’s a lot easier to forget they exist. And then you can marvel that, when it takes you hours or days to respond, the world does not, in fact, stop spinning on its axis. You are not actually indispensable.⁶

Essentially, giving up your smartphone is “not really a big deal” because you are not really a big deal. I am not really a big deal. What a giant, huge, monumental relief that is.

1. Technically tomorrow, but I doubt much is going to change in the next 12 hours.

2. Or the enneagram four.

3. Is this song a remnant of Carrie’s pre-religious-conversion era? Did Carrie Underwood want Jesus to take the wheel of her car before or after she took a Louisville slugger to the headlights of that other guy’s car? I’m so confused.

4. Frederick Buechner: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Do not be afraid.”

5. Facing them, by the way, has been terrible. Terrible terrible. But I think I’m more okay on this side of it than I would have been. I feel like I replaced all those smartphone tools with other tools (like running, which I’ve wanted to take seriously again for years). Too corny? I know. Doesn’t make it less true.

6. I understand how privileged this position is in a lot of ways, that my friends who work full-time will get fired if they ignore emails until 8 at night. I plan to write more about this compulsory participation that many of my friends feel—and that I will feel more intensely when school starts back. I don’t intend to gloss over it here, but there’s not space to say it all.